Sig Christenson: Another year of war for copter crews

The Pentagon earlier this week revealed that it would send 2,600 soldiers with the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Combat Aviation Brigade from Fort Hood to Afghanistan next summer.

That came as no surprise to anyone familiar with the 4th CAB, as soldiers in the unit call it. They have, after all, been to Iraq three times over the past six years, have lost ships and men and still kept going, fighting a war that goes on and on without resolution.

If anyone in the world doubts our commitment to war, look no further than this brigade.

It was led last year by grizzled veterans like Chief Warrant Officer 5 Lance McElhiney, a veteran gunship pilot from Vietnam, Gulf War I and three tours of Iraq.

McElhiney went back to Iraq in 2008 for another 12-month tour because the brigade was a mix of young and veteran troops, folks who were dedicated to the mission of flying troops, supplies and combat escort missions and in need of seasoned senior leadership.

As the Army’s senior AH-64D Apache Longbow pilot, he certainly qualifies on that score.

The 4th CAB returned to the Killeen area in June and barely six months later is back in a pre-deployment train-up cycle that will take them away from family and friends for good stretches of time. But that is only the beginning of their dedication, because it isn’t only the soldiers who will “embrace the suck.” as they like to call living in the war zone.

As always, the spouses of these pilots — the vast majority of them wives — will dread all this as they have from the start. They’ve spent three of the last six years alone, worrying about the possibility that an Apache, UH-60 Black Hawk or CH-47 Chinook helicopter will go down, sparking a flurry of phone calls and a wave of TV and newspaper stories.

They carry that weight while going on with their lives, raising children, showing up for work, taking care of the bills and a million other things the rest of us do as civilians.

What’s different for them is that the specter of sudden death is never far from mind.

Knowing pilots like McElhiney as I do, I’m sure they’re ready to go. They would, in fact, have a hard time not signing up for another tour, because they want to be there for their friends and comrades. They feel that if they’re around, everyone has a better chance of making it home. Beyond that, they believe their country needs them to stop the Taliban.

Knowing the wives as I do, I understand there is nothing more angushing than seeing their husbands board another charter plane at the Hood Army Airfield flightline. They want a break after all these years, and if you ask them they’d tell you that they’ve earned the right to one.

I can see the tears; I wish you could, too. We’ve asked more than anybody has ever imagined of these soldiers and their families and friends, and that is as true of the GIs and Marines and airmen and sailors who are in Afghanistan and Iraq as it is of copter pilots in the 4th CAB and other aviation units, their crew chiefs, gunners and mechanics.

But it’s coming again, another 12 months of war. There is no guarantee that, after this tour, there won’t be another one in Afghanistan, where a pitched fight is coming once the country thaws later this year. How 2010 goes may well shape the outcome of the war, and you can bet that everyone from privates to lieutenants to warrant officers to generals knows it, and they also realize there could be a high cost this time around.

The spouses of those 4th CAB soldiers who will leave in late spring and early summer also know the stakes. McElhiney’s wife expressed her angst in no uncertain terms during a Facebook exchange that followed President Obama’s early December speech.

Never an Obama fan to begin with, Laurie McElhiney was mad as hell about the president’s order. We all knew what would happen next, because while her husband could retire and call it a career after 40-plus years in the Army, he’s on the record — in our newspaper, at least — as saying he’d rather stand and fight and even die in battle than quit.

And true to his nature, nothing has changed.

“Is Lance going back? I thought he was finished!” a friend wrote in Facebook.

“Yes and no,” Laurie replied. “Yes, he is going back. No, he is not finished YET!”